Slimming Down Their Lives, Some Escape To A Floating Abode

Ben and Michelle Lambert have stressful lives by just about any measure.

He is an attorney for a Westchester-based union organizer and is typically on the road, away from their Queens home at least two or three nights a week, with stacks of documents always awaiting his return. She’s a social worker at a chronically-overloaded health care agency in the Bronx. Throw in an 18-month-old and two sets of elderly parents, and it’s not hard to gauge the load on their shoulders.

But when they escape to their Hamptons vacation home, both say, the tension of life seems to just drain out of them.

“I think it’s the rocking,” Ms. Lambert said. “I don’t think I’ve ever slept as well in my life as those two nights a week. Even when [the baby] wakes me up, I’m just so much more relaxed.”

The Lamberts’ vacation home rocks, usually gently, sometimes quite drastically. It also leaks a little bit. And it creaks and pops, sometimes loudly and in a way that would startle most people if their house made such a noise. But Mr. Lambert says the sounds are almost like white noise, steadying and relaxing in their incongruity with the surrounding silence.

It’s also small: three rooms totaling about 250 square feet, Mr. Lambert estimates. But it makes about 9 knots across Peconic Bay in a good southwest wind.

The couple bought their nearly 40-year-old 32-foot Oday sailboat for $18,000 just a year after they got married. With city rents, car payments and plans for a family, they knew a mortgage or summer rental was not fitting into their budgets anytime soon. But with both having grown up in semi-rural areas, they wanted an escape from the city. Mr. Lambert had grown up sailing small Sunfishes and suggested a sailboat. 
“We thought, what the heck, we can live small for, what, eight or 10 weekends a year?” he said. “It pretty quickly became basically every weekend for seven or eight months a year. We just love being there.”

In much of the Hamptons, palatial homes, double-digit room counts, swimming pools, tennis courts and garages are how second-home owners categorize their residence. For the Lamberts and others who make their second home on boats at local marinas and harbors each summer, the comparisons are a matter of just a few feet and whether or not there’s air conditioning. All say that no matter what the amenities, no matter how cramped the quarters, the allure of boat life is one of a level of peace—both of mind and decibels—that can only come with detachment from day-to-day life.

“When I hit the Napeague stretch, I just take a breath,” said Andy Schwinn, an East Quogue builder who spends every summer weekend and much of August with his wife and two young children on their boat in Montauk. “Montauk is only an hour from our house but it’s just far enough away to feel like you’re actually getting away. Even my 2-year-old knows when we’re going to the boat. For them it’s not regular time, it’s real family time, it’s more fun. I think they even behave better.”

Of course, life on a boat—where habitable space is measured in three figures, not four or five, and nothing is walk-in—has its difficulties and sacrifices far beyond what the rest of us have to accept. There are fewer things, fewer places to put things, and the things there are, are much smaller. Rooms, if there is more than one, are smaller; beds are smaller (a full-size bed is about the biggest you’ll find on anything but a very big boat); refrigerators are smaller; drawers are smaller; tables and chairs and couches (there really aren’t couches) are smaller—life is just smaller.

Which is a big part of the benefit, some say. With no room for so many of the belongings we all acquire out of some perceived “need,” life on a boat becomes a study in self-analysis.

“You realize just how much stuff you have when you move from a house to a boat,” said Victoria Homan, a mortgage broker who has lived predominantly on her boat in Southampton for 13 years. “I don’t even have air conditioning. It’s very back to basics. It brings you down to earth. It’s very freeing and really makes you realize how much we over-buy, and waste.”

Initially, for Ms. Homan, slimming down life was about getting rid of extraneous objects. Something as simple as getting rid of the cases things like CDs, sunglasses and tools come with was a first step. For a single, professional woman, it ultimately got down to the base of clothing.

“I probably started out having 30 big plastic tubs of stuff,” she said. “After about five years I got it down to seven or eight. Now I’m down to four and a few drawers, and a couple of those, actually, are just books and photos and letters I don’t want to throw away.

“You really have to be honest with yourself,” she added, “about what you use and don’t use, wear and don’t wear.”

The key to whittling down one’s true needs is the “one month rule”—a strategy every boat-lifer referenced.

“When the boat comes out in the fall you take everything not nailed down off—everything,” Mr. Schwinn said. “In the spring you start with a clean slate and go through everything and ask, ‘Do we really need this?’ Anything you’re on the fence with, you put it in a bin and if you don’t use it in a month, you don’t need it.”

For the 30-something East End native, that means no room for surfboards, even on a 41-foot Beneteau. The Schwinns spent 11 summers living on a 28-footer, with a lot fewer creature comforts: like showers, air conditioning, a freezer, two heads (that’s a bathroom on a boat, for you avowed landlubbers) and beds that don’t have to be folded up in the living room each morning. “But no matter how big the boat is, it’s too small,” Mr. Schwinn sighed.

For Ms. Homan, after years of boat life, downsized feels like life sized. Even during a frigid winter she spent on the boat, when going topside was not an option for sprawling out, she said, she came to relish the compartmentalized life. Even being at her dock in Southampton starts to feel too much like the tense life of a landlubber.

“I love being out on anchor, that’s my favorite—it feels like freedom—when you’re in a slip too long you get anxious,” she said. “I bought this boat in 2003 and I’ve never looked back. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”